The standard line is that Facebook Places isn't meant to kill
Foursquare at all, and that Facebook wants to federate the
various location-based social networks instead of competing with
them directly.

That's a load of crap.

Location is the next wave of social networking and Mark
Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, knows it. Facebook Places competes
directly with Foursquare and the other upstarts: if people
check-in on Facebook, local merchants will manage their store
pages on Facebook and offer promotions through Facebook. They'll
have no time for Foursquare and the rest. Conversely, if people
check in on Foursquare, the users, the venue owners and the local
advertising dollars will flow to Foursquare. What's worse, it
increasingly looks like Foursquare's social graph is going to be
more valuable than Facebook's: the kind of people you feel
comfortable pushing your location to are your real friends, much
more so than the vague acquaintances and long-lost high school
buddies we've all reluctantly accepted as friends.

Facebook could go head to head with Foursquare and copy the rest
of its features, like game mechanics, badges and mayorships, but
Zuckerberg is smart enough to know he can't do that, because
fighting a smaller, nimbler startup on their own turf doesn't
work -- he's been there.

Fortunately, we've got the solution. There's another
location-based checkin game app out there, called SCVNGR.
SCVNGR is much more explicitly based around gaming than
Foursquare, and works around the concept of "challenges," like do
X check-ins there to win Y points, which may or may not be tied
to a real reward. SCVNGR can push challenges to their users based
on deals, but venue owners can create their own challenges and
users can create challenges for each other.

This is much more flexible than the "mayor" paradigm because
while only one person can be the mayor of a given venue, several
people can complete the same challenge like, say, check-in twice
a week at that place for a month. It promises to be more engaging
for users -- we've all been frustrated to go to a place we like
but where there's no chance in hell to become the mayor -- and
for marketers -- who can tailor deals and promotions more
precisely. (SCVNGR already raised a bunch of money from, among
others, Google Ventures, so we doubt Facebook could afford to buy
them, which would be even better.) (Edit:
Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley emailed us to point out that
around 70% of deals on Foursquare are not mayor deals. We're not
sure this is the perception of consumers, however.)

Importantly for Facebook, this "challenges" model dovetails
perfectly with what Facebook Places is trying to do. Rather than
try to invent their own kinds of badges to out-Foursquare
Foursquare, they can let users and marketers create their own
challenges. Facebook could promote the points that the challenges
would earn by tying them with Facebook Credits, their virtual
currency. You could "tag" people on challenges as a way to dare
them to complete a challenge, and that would be posted to their
Wall.

Right now, the thing that Foursquare has and that Facebook Places
sorely lacks is, for want of a better term, pizazz. Excitement.
We have a hard time believing Facebook can deliver that in-house.
But by copying one more feature, maybe they let their users
create it.